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BOSA on cocaine
heres a story i thought was really good:
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http://www.iht.com/articles/524312.html
In Peru, a new company is producing a soft drink that its creators pledge will transform this Andean country, if successful.
That is a big if, because while KDrink is filled with vitamins, calcium and proteins that attract health-conscious consumers, its most important ingredient is coca, the much-maligned green leaf used to make cocaine. That same leaf will provide the drinks kick.
But that has not stopped the Peruvian maker, Kokka Royal Food & Drink, from filling 200,000 of the 10-ounce, or 30-centiliter, bottles since operations began in February.
You dont get this from Gatorade, said Anselm Pi Rambla, the Spanish investor who has spearheaded the project. It does not give you a high like crack cocaine. But it does give you energy you can use.
In Peru, that pitch that KDrink is natural and good for consumers has the beverage flying off the shelves of some of Perus biggest supermarket chains. Though priced at $1 a bottle, far more than other beverages, KDrink is selling about 50,000 bottles a month.
But it is the possibility that KDrink could be sold abroad that is seen as a tantalizing solution for poverty-stricken coca farmers who are periodically forced to eradicate their illicit crops in Washington-backed anti-drug efforts.
The Peruvian government contends that 83 percent of the coca grown here goes toward the narcotics trade, with the rest going for medicinal and cultural uses permitted by law. But farmers, who insist that more than half the crop is legal, block roads or march in the capital, Lima, every few weeks to prod the government into reversing its policies.
For us, this is wonderful because any commercialization of coca is important, said Diodora Espinoza, who leads coca farmers in Huanuco state.
Coca is already used inside Peru and Bolivia The makers are small artisan outfits with close ties to the indigenous groups that have long consumed the leaves to mitigate hunger and increase stamina.
Pi Rambla said he and his Peruvian partners got the idea for KDrink from watching tourists drink coca in hotels in Cuzco and other Peruvian highland cities.
In this region of South America, coca tea is so common and accepted that it has even been regularly served in the American Embassy in Bolivia.
Coca has a lot to give, she said, moments before helping lead an anti-government march on a recent afternoon. It offers all kinds of things. The U.S. has demonized it, but it has properties that are positive. To be sure, medical studies show that coca has everything from zinc to magnesium and vitamin C. Cocaine is found among the 14 alkaloids in the coca leaf, but many researchers and coca experts in the Andes say the amounts are tiny. It is when the leaves are ground and mixed in an elaborate process with a range of chemicals that refined cocaine is produced.
We want to get to countries that are more permissive, Tudela said, to demystify the coca leaf.
The New York Times
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I like the idea of taking a locally grown crop and transforming it from the source of the worlds cocaine to a healthy energy drink. The andean region is a very poor and impoverished place, for too long held under Amercian military might. Seeing fit to destroy much of their staple crops to inhibit a drug trade that allows anywhere from 80-90% of the worlds cocaine to be consumed in the USA.
Some wonder if in North America we need to be protected not from outside terror but from ourselves and our dirty little habits. But back to the peruvians, and bolivians, having the chance to change their fate, by producing coca for an energy drink.
Drug lords beware the power of common men to find a way out of your slavery. the andean people seem to have started a fledgling little business that if accepted world-wide could see much prosperity in this region.
(And not the shitty sweat-shop type properity that sees a precious few get rich while the rest slave away over basketball shoes and plastic toy parts.) This is real, sustainable, domestically familiar prosperity using crops indigineous to the region, where natives could participate in the harvesting of the coca bean as they have done for a few thousand years.
to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund- why didnt you think of something like this? i guess its a small step, but symbolically to me its very very big. Its that type of smarts that can allow other impoverished nations to look not to outside institutions and their big bags of money but to their own people and their own land to see what it may offer.
Perhaps Koka energy drink will make it here to North America, where autorities would no doubt express concern over a drink tht contains minute traces of an illegal substance. (Despite the fact that we sell JOLT cola, the "heart attack in a can" of colas, or Sports drinks that contain enough sugar to speed up our ever escalating Childhood onset Diabetes crisis.)
Perhaps its time we turn to something real, something natural: some Koka!!!
bosa lives.
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